


Behave Abnormally

by dilapidatedcorvid



Category: The Locked Tomb Trilogy | Gideon the Ninth Series - Tamsyn Muir
Genre: Alternate Universe - Superheroes/Superpowers, Crack, background Camilla Hect/Coronabeth Tridentarius, gethectd
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-06-06
Updated: 2020-06-06
Packaged: 2021-03-04 01:54:17
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,770
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/24565708
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/dilapidatedcorvid/pseuds/dilapidatedcorvid
Summary: It's not just her day off, it’s the whole team’s day off. If Harrow had her way, she’d work every waking hour. But Canaan House Superheroes has been trying to be more employee-friendly as of late, and part of that involves adhering closely with labour laws. Hence, the day off-- god himself will have to come down and have a chat before Cam lets anything get between them and their well-earned day of rest.As it turns out, god looks like a tarmac version of the Michelin man, his arrival is hailed by terrified screaming, and he is very, very, convincing.
Comments: 11
Kudos: 25





	Behave Abnormally

**Author's Note:**

> Written for Get Hect 2020.  
> Happy birthday to Camilla Hect, patron saint of all Cavs, keeper of the singular brain cell, and to Palamedes Sextus, polygon come to life, child prodigy, and the brightest and most impactful (hah) scholar known under the light of Dominicus.

It’s Camilla Hect’s day off, and no reports, no villains, and certainly no hulking concrete behemoth of a monster is about to take that away from her, no sir, nothing. She’s going to sit here with her sunglasses tucked into her breast pocket (yes, they’re the pair Gideon gave her and yes, they look ridiculous but no, she’s not going to stop wearing them), audiobook playing through her headphones, sitting by the glass window of this perfectly delightful and pedestrian coffeeshop and pointedly ignore her phone. One hand is folded over her own stomach, long, tapered fingers resting against the leather of her belt and the pressed shirt tucked underneath her waistband. Even on her day off, Camilla insists on being well-dressed. Her other hand is on the table beside the small white bowl of coffee, curled around a pale hand with golden painted nails.

Coronabeth squeezes her fingers gently over Cam’s hand, sunlight making her mauve eyes look almost lilac. She’s daydreaming about something as she stares into the distance, an abandoned book left on her lap. Across the table, Gideon’s casually lounging in a chair, slouching in a manner that’s entirely more artful than she might have intended. There’s a plate with only crumbs as evidence of the sandwich that used to sit there, polished entirely. There’s the slightest bit of mayonnaise on her chin that Cam wants to tell her about, but the sunlight is warm across her shoulders, all the tension in those muscles let loose like spooling thread in the midday sun. Harrow’s here too, curled into the corner of the table that has the least amount of sun. She’s got a newspaper clasped between her hands and a pen caught between her gnawing teeth, counting letters on her fingers before she arrives at the correct crossword answer and puts it onto the grey paper.

It's not just _her_ day off, it’s the whole team’s day off. If Harrow had her way, she’d work every waking hour. But Canaan House Superheroes has been trying to be more employee-friendly as of late, and part of that involves adhering closely with labour laws. Hence, the day off-- god himself will have to come down and have a chat before Cam lets anything get between them and their well-earned day of rest.

As it turns out, god looks like a tarmac version of the Michelin man, his arrival is hailed by terrified screaming, and he is very, very, convincing.

She feels it first, as she does most things most of the time. It’s a tiny vibration from the ground to her feet and up her legs that draws her eyes to the outside of the café about a block down. It’s peaceful now, but Cam knows it’s the calm before the storm.

Gideon looks up from her empty plate when she catches Cam’s eyebrows furrow ever so slightly. “On our day off? Really?”

A beat later, the horrified shrieking begins. It’s followed by the wailing of car sirens as they’re crushed underfoot by something heavy enough to shake the ground and a roar that comes straight out of Pacific Rim’s kaiju sound samples.

Camilla sighs and calmly disconnects her Bluetooth earbuds. She puts them in their small case, stands, pushes the chair back, and puts the case into her front pocket. Around them, people are crowding around the windows and fleeing into the streets in equal amounts, ceramic smashing and voice turning from a nervous bubble to a ceaseless tide of horror and amazement. Phones come out to record the destruction and Cam puts her own away. She could leave it here and replace it later, but then she’d lose her place in the audiobook and it’s just starting to get quite good.

The others have come to their feet too, Corona taking one last sip of the coffee half-spilt into the saucer from the stampede. Harrow looks less than thrilled to have been taken away from her crossword but she’s pulling the sleeves of her sweater up to her elbows, ready. Gideon, of course, looks like an excited puppy.

“Shall we?” Camilla asks, and like idiots, like brainless fools, like absolute buffoons, they walk out the door together towards the source of this panic.

\--

Asphalt Stay Puft has put its foot through four luxury cars along Beach Avenue by the time the four arrive. He’s four storeys of craggy pavement slapped onto a misshapen snowman with legs. They bow under the weight of the massive behemoth currently shoving a crumped Cadillac into its mouth, the alarm sounding and lights flashing like the car itself is making some futile final struggle against the rocky maw it crunches under. Its arms are just as long, if not longer than its legs, a horrible mockery of an ape. The construct falls back onto all four legs and the tiny head mounted between the arms— front legs? —turns abruptly to look at the new arrivals, two dots glowing a tacky early 2000s neon green.

Cam feels something tugging at her mind again, the slightest vibration in the earth. A transfer of weight. Intention.

“Incoming!”

She and Harrow dive to the left as Gideon and Coronabeth scramble the other direction. The Ferrari the golem throws at them crunches hard onto the street, leaving a small crater and spiderwebbing cracks before it bounces and barrel-rolls harmlessly to rest on the side of the street facing the wrong direction. Offside parking.

The golem roars angrily and rises up to two feet, angrily beating its rocky chest before it starts charging down the street towards them, its every footfall moving the ground in waves with the sheer weight of its body. It’s horribly disorientating for Cam and she grunts past the headache that’s starting to grow in time with Dented Bowlingball’s steps. It’s her goddamn day off and if this thing gets her nice boots scuffed, she is going to find some loophole in her superhero contract so she can _actually_ commit murder.

She snarls and slams both palms into the ground. A massive wall of earth erupts out of the street in front of the behemoth, coming up to its stupidly big shoulders. The horrible thing crashes into the wall with a terrible roar and it cracks but holds. Good enough for half a minute to plan.

“Harrow, does the car chassis inside it count as a skeleton?” Gideon shouts from behind a car. Her hands glow a brilliant red as energy coalesces into a comically large two-hander, nearly taking a lock of Coronabeth’s hair as it appears.

“Ha- _ha_ , Griddle, very funny.” Harrow reaches out her hands and closes her eyes, brow furrowed. Her fingers twitch a little and a few flecks of white free themselves from the earthen wall, suspended in the air.

“Thin pickings,” Cor says a little disappointed.

“Are you doubting me?”

“Absolutely not.”

“Hey guys, can we save this for later? We—"

The wall bursts open, disintegrating into clods of earth. The construct bellows loudly in victory, drops to four legs, and begins to lumber towards them. Its tiny beady eyes glow an angry green and it’s significantly faster now like this on all fours and Cam curses, calling on the scattered earth up into a massive fist floating in the air made of concrete and dirt. It’s slow work though, and Angry Highway is approaching fast.

As she concentrates, tiny shards of bone shoot forward from where they’ve been suspended in air, embedding themselves in the places where the yellow and white-striped tarmac has gaps and from them emerge full skeletons, two dozen osseous expendables clinging onto a rampaging bull of pavement. They raise their arms to the sky and their ulnas suddenly begin to warp into long scythes that they stab deep into whatever this creature is made of.

“Careful, Cam!” Gideon shouts. Cam’s forehead beads with sweat. The fist, clenched and knuckles jutting out in intimidating fashion, is complete, and the Indy 500 track is almost on her. She does a spectacular shoulder roll out of the way—she kind of hopes someone caught that on camera, it probably looked very good indeed—just in time. The monstrosity charges past them and digs its heels into the road to slow down and turn around, leaving long grooves so deep the city might actually consider filling these holes up before the end of the year. It’s summer, they still have time. Cam swings both arms down in an arc across her body and the earthen fist follows, slamming itself into the back of the creature in what she would suppose is the neck, but who knows at this point? Certainly not her.

As the earthen fist explodes, twin blasts of flame sear the side of the golem, hot enough Cam feels it from here. She shields her face a little, showered with bone as a handful of poor skeletons are scattered to the wind by the combined elemental assault. The construct bellows in pain. It’s a lullaby that soothes her racing heart.

“When my ma told me the streets were dangerous, this is what she was talking about!” A voice shouts, and Cam resists the urge to facepalm. Where does Gideon find the time for these lines? It doesn’t matter much though, because Gideon’s run out from behind cover to stand under the golem and is swinging her sword up into the thing like the blade weighs nothing—despite being made entirely out of amorphous energy Palamedes can’t explain, much to his frustration, it does actually weigh a non-insignificant amount—and slashing gaping wounds into asphalt. It showers fragments of earth onto her stupid black sleeveless hoodie she insists on wearing to everything, and it’s a half-decent look with the battle-rage burning in Gideon’s eyes.

That is, until the construct roars, rising to two feet and punting Gideon down the street before staggering a step back from the offending human.

Gideon hits the ground, rolls over, and groans this horrible noise Cam’s come to learn after too many hours in the ring as Nav’s _oh god I broke a rib or two_ groan. It’s not a good sound.

The golem, feet a little more under itself now, lifts its front two stony columns over its head and bellows, bringing them down on the crumpled body on the road for the finishing blow.

Cam could try and take the blow for her, Cam could try and pull Gideon out of the way, but she’s just fast. Not _that_ fast. Either way, she doesn’t need to. There’s a shift in the ground behind her and she whispers a prayer of thanks to whatever god is listening for Harrow’s quick thinking as bone fragments from the expendables fly through the air and form a slightly off-white osseous dome around Gideon’s prone body just as the arms crack down on it with tremendous force. The dome holds and Cam breathes a sigh of relief.

“Cam!”

She looks up and Cor’s waving at her making first a swimming, then an explosion gesture with her hands. Oh. _Oh!_

“Absolutely brilliant,” she mutters under her breath and reaches out her hands. She can feel where Gideon’s laying—no, she’s gotten up to kneeling now, the tenacious bastard—and she begins to raise the disk of earth under the bone shell up out of the ground. Sweat drips into her eyes and she blinks it away furiously. She can’t drop Gideon now, that would just be rude. It’s even worse when the arms come down against the shell again and she grunts with the effort of keeping the platform afloat. If this is going to work, it’s going to take some coordination.

“You ready, Harrow?”

She can see Harrow nod out of the corner of her eye, bloodsweat running down Harrow’s own face. On the other side of the street, Coronabeth has started to float, her entire body glowing bright like a star, growing in intensity with each passing second.

“Ready, and—”

Camilla cries out with the strain and flings the disk towards the golem, sliding just out of the way of its swinging appendage. Her part is done. The bone shell disintegrates as Harrow releases the magic holding it together, and Gideon, ever trusty Gideon, is there with her sword. Just as the disk is about to slam into the thing’s torso, Gideon’s leaping up and off, bringing the sword down and then stabbing up with a roar. It’s a violent thing. The blade cleaves through rock right where a now-dust skeleton had started opening it up with its ulna scythe. It plunges deep into the creature’s chest and Gideon hangs on when the Behemoth recoils, trying to shake this bothersome being off. It must hurt the ribs immensely, but Gideon’s pulling herself up against gravity and jerking the sword down with her bodyweight, cutting a gash into the thing’s chest.

“Cor!”

Gideon winks at them and then the sword disappears and she’s falling. Cam grits her teeth past the cramp that’s starting in her side and she turns the pavement below Gideon into a dirt ramp, turning her fall into a dramatic slide to a stop. Gideon finds her feet and makes her way as quickly as she can over to the sidewalk where Harrow and Cam are crouched.

“Hey, thanks.”

Above them, Coronabeth, now a flying supernova of searing light, soars through the sky and slams into the golem like a diver cutting into water from the board. Her hands, pressed together above her, punch through the gaping hole Gideon left in its chest. She lets fire erupt from her fingertips, a spreading inferno hot enough to weaken whatever holds these rocks together, and she jams herself as close she can to the body of the golem.

“Say goodbye, sweetheart,” she says, clasps her hands together, and lets everything erupt.

It’s too bright to see anyways so they’re all looking away, but Harrow brings up a bone shield anyways as the construct erupts. It makes a horrible discordant screech as it goes, like if someone snapped all the strings of a piano at once and let it echo through an empty concert hall. The sky starts raining bounders and one crunches on a shiny convertible. Harrow shrugs.

“Never did like Maseratis.”

When the rocks stop falling, Cam pulls herself out from behind the ruined sports car behind her and she pats its mangled hood in mock sympathy. It doesn’t matter that much; these things aren’t meant to last. She walks out into the middle of the street where there’s a scorch mark that mars the pavement and halfway up the buildings on either side. A souvenir from today’s havoc, if the destruction and detritus around them isn’t enough.

Coronabeth is still floating down from the sky, her yellow sundress billowing in the sky. How Cor makes yellow work, Cam still hasn’t quite figured out yet. Yellow is nobody’s colour, and yet it’s Cor’s. She reaches her arms out and lets the falling body pillow in her arms, cradling Cor against her chest. It doesn’t work that well with how much taller than Cam Corona is, but it’s really the thought that counts. That, and Cam’s been doing bicep curls specifically so she can do this.

Corona’s eyes are closed in peaceful rest when she settles, only opening when she’s had her princess moment. When golden eyelashes do flutter open, her smile is as effortless as the way her hair remains perfect despite the explosion. “Was I amazing?” She asks, entirely too tenderly for the fact that she had just blown a highway offramp’s worth of pavement into smithereens.

“You were brilliant,” Cam answers.

Cor smiles and reaches for Cam’s glasses in her breast pocket, unfolding them and placing them carefully on Cam’s aquiline nose. “Perfect,” she says, and closes her eyes again, content to rest draped over Cam’s arms.

Cam snorts, amused, and turns back to the rest of her team. “Shall we?”

Harrow is helping Gideon to her feet and she dusts off her sweater. Gideon just readjusts her sunglasses and grins when she sees that Cam is matching her. They both fall behind to flank her on either side, half a step behind. Someone had better take a photo of this, a squad of superheroes walking away from a job well done. And on their day off too. Gideon’s clearly thinking the same thing if the hair toss is any indication.

As they walk, Cam kicks both her feet a little further ahead to give her boots a once over. A little dusty, but no scuffs.

No one dies today.

**Author's Note:**

> Superpower References:  
> Gideon: energy weapon manifestation, one brain cell that knows no fear  
> Camilla: prescience, earth manipulation, actual executive functioning  
> Harrow: osseous manipulation  
> Coronabeth: pyrokinesis/explosion inducement, flight
> 
> Thanks to [@corvidlesbian](https://archiveofourown.org/users/corvidlesbian) for beta'ing at the last moment.
> 
> Title from Homemade Dynamite by Lorde.
> 
> Tumblr: [frumpkinspocketdimension](https://frumpkinspocketdimension.tumblr.com)  
> Discord: SweetBabyRae#0967


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